Today I had a look at the early draft of the JPA 2.0 spec and like. Here are my highlights of the new features:

Added support for persistently ordered lists using OrderColumn and provider-managed ordering column.-> Greate! That was really missing!

Defined support for foreign key mapping strategy for unidirectional one-to-many relationships.-> Very good. It's not very handy to use a relationship table in a one-to-many mapping

Added clear method to EntityManager interface to allow entities to be evicted from the persistence context; added CLEAR cascade option.-> Bulk Update and Delete will be even more useful

Added Cache interface.-> I'm not sure if it's a great idea, but who knows...

Added support for pessimistic locking and new lock mode types.-> I hope JPA will also provide support for SELECT FOR UPDATE

Added overloaded find and refresh methods added to support locking with standardized and vendor-specific properties and hints.-> Very good, it's no longer required to define an extra query

Added standardized hint javax.persistence.lock.timeout for use in locking configuration.-> Great idea!

Added the standardized properties javax.persistence.jdbc.driver, javax.persistence.jdbc.url, javax.persistence.jdbc.user, javax.persistence.jdbc.password for use in persistence unit and entity manager factory configuration.-> Super! It will be simpler to change the persistence provider in standalone environment. And it will be easier for the tools provider to support persitence.xml properties completion.

Added Query getNamedParameters and getPositionalParameters methods.-> good thing, at least for debugging